Category: Business of health

The following is a guest blog post from one of our regular contributors, Alan Cassels, who is an author, journalist, and drug policy researcher with an interest in how clinical research and experience on pharmaceuticals gets translated for policy-makers, prescribers and consumers. ————————– A March 20th story in the Boston Globe. “Biogen drug offers hope for [...]

The following is a guest post from Andrew Holtz, one of our longtime contributors, my former colleague at CNN, and a past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists. This is at least the sixth time that we have addressed National Press Foundation workshop funding on this site. ———————— The question came from multiple [...]

Fox News this week provides us several prime examples of why we look for independent perspectives with no conflicts of interest in news stories about health care. One story on their website this week is headlined, “3D bioprinting offers minimally invasive surgery options.” While there are several people quoted in the story, all of them [...]

Thanks to Dr. Richard Lehman for my morning chuckle and for providing a link to a serious concern. Lehman, in his weekly journal review blog for The BMJ, writes: “I once sat through a presentation by a Dutch medical entrepreneur in which we were shown the continuous monitoring environment of the future, in which every [...]

Pitt urologist Benjamin Davies writes on a Forbes blog, “Prostate Cancer Advertising: Lies And The Damn Lies (Part 1).” He criticizes ads in the Sunday New York Times Magazine and in The New Yorker from last weekend. He writes: I have a rating system for prostate cancer advertisements based on two self-evident tenets. First, cancer advertising [...]

It’s a new twist on “having skin in the game.” During today’s USA World Cup match, Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City tweeted: Ok to cheer for the red, white and blue. But with these “free skin cancer screenings,” I wonder if people were told that: The US Preventive Services Task Force concludes “that [...]

While I’m working on a grant proposal to keep this project alive, my publishing efforts have fallen off a bit. But it’s comforting to know that somebody else is doing some watchdog work – somebody like Paul Raeburn at the Knight Science Journalism Tracker. This week he wrote, “Cystic fibrosis breakthrough, or Wall Street coup?” [...]

There’s no need for me to go into the details of Dr. Mehmet Oz’s tough questioning by the The U.S Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation’s Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Insurance yesterday. It’s been widely covered. But of many troublesome things he said, one stands out to me: “My job is [...]

Usually when I make suggestions to journalists about things to cover, I urge them to report on questions of evidence for two of the fastest growing and most expensive medical technologies: proton beam radiation therapy and robotic surgery. Recently, the American Society for Radiation Oncology issued a new model policy for proton beam therapy. In [...]

Interesting story in the Star Tribune, on “Dermatology’s Tug of War.” Its primary theme – claims about a shortage of dermatologists – has been making headlines for a long time. Some doubt whether there’s a real shortage. (See dermatologist Orin Goldblum’s comments in this story, for example.) But the secondary theme is what intrigues me: [...]

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This short piece focuses on the story of one patient’s (thus far) successful treatment for a particularly aggressive cancer. It does a nice job with this limited material, but taking a broader look at the evidence would’ve yielded a stronger, more useful story.

The claims made by one of the authors of a very small, short-term study — that vitamin D “made the cancer better” — deserved a more thorough analysis than this story provided. But the bottom line message was accurate.